I. Saying something more definitive about “resilience”: 4 points
1. The problem with calling for more research on resilience is the path dependency now long entrenched: The proliferation of new types of resilience exceeds the operationalization of the constructs already out there. More research should mean more operationalization, but there are no guarantees if the past is our guide.
In other words, resiliencies have been differentiated conceptually, but many of the conceptual constructs remain equally devoid of the details and specifics for relevant policy and management, case by case. One of the best things Paul Schulman and I did in our research on electricity infrastructures was to develop an empirical measure of when and how the transmission grid operators moved within, outside, and back into their real-time bandwidths for reliable service provision.
Operationalizing requires not thinking in terms of abstract nouns, like “resilience” or “adaptive capacity,” but thinking adverbially. To ask, “What does it mean here and now to act resiliently with respect to this rather than that,” has the great virtue of pressing for identification and specification of the practices that actually constitute “acting resiliently.” We can all talk about safety culture, but it is quite another matter to identify and differentiate the specific practices of doing this resiliently rather than that in real time.
2. “Building in resilience” can have the same kind of abstractness associated with “designing leadership:” far too easy to recommend rather than operationalize. But even if planners knew the adverbial specifications of “building in resilience” for emergency management, none of this would lessen the priority role of improvisation and ingenuity by professionals in emergency response.
There is no planner’s workaround for improvisation. This means the question, “When is ‘resilient-enough’ enough?,” is not answerable by planners on their own.
3. Resilience, at the conceptual level, is said to be optimizing the ability to absorb or rebound from shocks, while minimizing the need to anticipate these shocks ahead of time. Anticipation, in contrast conceptually, is to optimize the ability to plan ahead and deal with shocks before they happen, while minimizing having to cope with shocks when they do occur. Consider the resulting Table 1:
System planners would like managers to be both optimally anticipatory and resilient at the same time—indeed that managers maximize their “readiness” for whatever arises, whenever. These all-embracing demands of planners and project designers can, however, reduce the managers’ much-needed capacity to balance anticipation and resilience case by case. Indeed, to do the latter requires respect for the granularities of resiliencies, not their abstractions.
4. Readers are familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to emergencies, without however providing the details for that implementation, here and now rather than then and there.
While it is too easy to make such calls, notice the positive practical implication: Those who do know (some of) the details and practices have much to say about the respective abstractions called variously, “resilience”.
We know that real-time operators and managers of critical infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring infrastructure operations back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time. (The latter aren’t what most planners and designers consider “comprehensive and holistic”!)
Two inter-related implications follow. First, these operators and managers are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operationalized definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination matter for and in practice. There is no reason to believe these operational definitions have been sufficiently canvassed to date by scholars of resilience, let alone macro-planners and designers.
II. Resilience isn’t what you think
The opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back from the same. But how true is that? Both occur at the individual level, and the opposite of the individual is the collective (think “team situational awareness”), not a different individual with different behavior.
We observed reliability professionals in critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of operations in the system:
Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience
- Reliability professionals adjusting back to within de jure or defacto bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
- Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by reliability professionals (restoration resilience);
- Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and
- Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others (recovery resilience)
Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies deployed by the system’s real-time managers and tied to the state of system operations in which they find themselves. Resilience differs depending on whether or not the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. (Think of pastoralist systems here as critical infrastructure.)
Resilience, as such, is not a single property of the system to be turned on or off as and when needed. Nor is it, as a system feature, reducible to anything like a “resilient” herder, though such herders exist.
Why does it matter that resilience is a systemwide set of options, processes and strategies? What you take to be the loss of the herd, a failure in pastoralist operations that you say comes inevitably with drought, may actually be perceived and treated by pastoralists themselves as a temporary disruption after which operations are to be restored. While you, the outsider, can say their “temporary” really isn’t temporary in this day and age, it is their definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.
To return to Table 1, herder systems that maintain normal operations are apt to demonstrate what we call precursor resilience. Normal doesn’t mean what happens when there are no shocks to the system. Shocks happen all the time, and normal operations are all about responding to them in such a way as to ensure they don’t lead to temporary system disruption or outright system failure. Formally, the precursors of disruption and failure are managed for, and reliably so. Shifting from one watering point, when an interfering problem arises there, to another just as good or within a range of good-enough is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.
Pastoralist systems, nevertheless, can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, offtake of livestock products is interrupted, random lightning triggers veldt fires—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to normal is better termed restoration resilience. Access to other grazing areas (or alternative feed stocks or alternative sources of livelihood) may be required in the absence of fallbacks normally available.
So too resilience as a response to shocks looks very different by way of management strategies when the shocks lead to system failure and onward recovery from that failure. In this case, an array of outside, inter-organizational resources and personnel—public, private, NGO, humanitarian—are required in addition to the resources of the pastoralist herders. These recovery arrangements and resources are unlike anything marshaled by way of precursor or restoration resiliencies within the herder communities themselves.
There is nothing predetermined in the Table 1 sequence. Nothing says it is inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal (indeed the probability of system failure in recovery can be higher than in normal operations in large sociotechnical systems). It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from the new normal. To outsiders, it may look like some of today’s pastoralist systems are in unending recovery, constantly trying to catch up with one disaster after another.
The reality may be that the system is already at a new normal, operating to a standard of reliability quite different than you might think. (Imagine that wet season grazing areas were magically restored to pastoralists who already adapted to their disappearance. Real-time herder options would increase, but would the collective response be altogether positive now? That question can only be answered if you are first clear about what is the actual system being managed now and the operating standard of reliability to which it is being managed before the restoration.)
If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its high reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity as well as exploit the upsides of new possibilities and opportunities that emerge in real time,” then they are able to do so because of being capable to undertake the different types of resiliencies listed here, contingent on the stage of operations herders as a collectivity find themselves.
Or to put the key point from the other direction, a system demonstrating precursor resilience, restoration resilience, emergency response coordination and recovery resilience is the kind of system better able to withstand the downsides of shocks and uncertainty and exploit their upsides. Here too, nothing predetermines that every pastoralist system will exhibit all four resiliencies, if and when their states of operation change.
The above raises a methodological point. If I and my colleagues can come up with four different types of system resilience—forget about the empirically different articulations of resilience at the micro and meso levels—we might pause over how useful any catchall term “resilience” is. More positively, when using the term resilience the burden of proof is on each of us to empirically differentiate the term for the case at hand.
To summarize, any notion that resilience is a single property or has a dominant definition or is there/not there or is best exemplified at the individual level is incorrect and misleading when system reliability is at stake.
III. Spread the word: We need more Extreme Climate Resilience Desks for real-time infrastructure operations!
Below I cut and paste from an email sent to me yesterday by Scott Humphrey, Executive Director of the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region. It proposes an intervention that, I believe deserves wider distribution and application not just to marine infrastructures but to the real-time operations centers of other critical infrastructures as well.
Several months ago, I did this webinar for a maritime security audience. The webinar describes the Extreme Climate Resilience Desk concept. I’ve also presented at several conferences.
Here’s a link to the video webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWOZtFDPZTI&t=3s
In lieu of watching the whole video, here’s a summary of the Extreme Climate Resilience Desk SFMX video.
The concept focuses on creating a “Climate Resilience Desk” at the Marine Exchange of San Francisco to better anticipate and manage climate-related system shocks in maritime operations. Here’s a breakdown of the key points:
Bold Initiative: The proposed Climate Resilience Desk aims to enhance real-time awareness and management of climate-related shocks to maritime transportation, much like current systems handle port security and maritime traffic emergencies. This initiative is critical for adapting to the ‘new normal’ of constant, unpredictable climate events affecting maritime and associated sectors.
Case Study Analysis: A detailed case study from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017 is used to highlight how interconnected and seemingly unrelated factors like maritime transportation, rice production, and rain can intersect and create systemic shocks, illustrating the complex interdependencies in regional operations.
Water Management Challenges: The video discusses the challenges of managing waterways in the face of extreme weather events, such as the near-catastrophe at Oroville Dam in 2017. It underscores the need for an integrated approach to manage the reservoirs, dams, and spillways that are critical to the state’s water management system.
Operational Interdependencies: The importance of understanding and managing operational interdependencies in the San Francisco Bay Region is emphasized. This includes the interactions between rainfall, dams, rice shipments, and the capacity of waterways to handle sudden increases in water volume.
Infrastructure Needs: The proposed desk would use existing resources and data to support decision-makers, including pilots and tug operators, by providing them with timely, actionable information during extreme weather events.
Leveraging Data for Resilience: By aggregating publicly available data and utilizing advanced GIS systems, the Climate Resilience Desk could preemptively manage risks and maintain operations during climate shocks.
Stakeholder Collaboration: The initiative calls for increased collaboration among various stakeholders, including government agencies, emergency organizations, and private sector entities, to enhance maritime domain awareness and preparedness.
The proposed Climate Resilience Desk, through comprehensive data analysis and stakeholder cooperation, aims to transform how climate-related risks are managed, ensuring more resilient maritime and regional operations.
F. Scott Humphrey
Executive Director, Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region
Chairperson, Harbor Safety Committee of the San Francisco Bay Region
Office 415.441.5045 Mobile 510.393.6856
Web www.sfmx.org Email ScottH@sfmx.org
10 Commodore Drive, Emeryville, CA 94608
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 